A student takes a nap while studying: The price of a college education has nearly doubled since 1995, far outpacing inflation. Andersen Ross/Blend Images/Corbis

September 12, 2012

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Americans "all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful," says Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast, but our obsession with getting a degree at all costs is getting out of hand. We're telling students that college grads make 80 percent more than their counterparts with just a high-school diploma, and that the student-loan debt they're piling up is a necessary investment. As a result, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded jumped by 50 percent between 1992 and 2008. The trouble is, 60 percent of those additional students wound up in jobs they probably could have landed without a degree — waitress, electrician, secretary, mail carrier. Indeed, many young Americans who arrive on campus expecting a diploma to propel them to success are finding "it won't even get them out of the spare bedroom at Mom and Dad's." Which begs the question: "Is all this investment in college education really worth it? The answer, I fear, is that it's not." Is this too pessimistic a view on college, or is the bill for four years of tuition really a bad investment?

College doesn't always pay off, but not going is worse: McArdle says an increasing number of kids are worse off, financially speaking, when they leave campus than when they arrived, says Daniel Luzer at Washington Monthly. "This is a good point. But it doesn't mean that college wasn't worth it." These financially hobbled grads are still more likely to get a job, and earn more, than if they "never set foot on campus." The problem is that we're pumping fewer public resources into education, so students are having to pay a bigger chunk of the bill."The lousy investment?"

Higher education is a better investment than ever: Sure, the average student leaves campus owing $30,000, says Felix Salmon at Reuters, but that's "still a small price to pay for a lifetime of access to jobs and promotions which would otherwise be off-limits." In fact, the "wage premium" for college graduates is only getting bigger in our digital economy. "So while the cost of going to college is rising, the cost of not going to college is, arguably, rising even faster.""The necessity of a college education"

But one day, college might be a bad investment: College might not pay off for some marginal students, says Dylan Matthews at The Washington Post, but, according to the Brookings Institution, money invested in college still "more than triples your investment, an astounding rate of return compared to traditional investments such as stocks and bonds." That's why it's premature to dismiss college as a bad investment. However: At the rate tuition is ballooning, there will come a day when college is a bad investment — "unless growth in tuition costs is corralled.""College is still a great investment. But it's getting worse"